Breathin': The Eddy Zheng Story

The Youngest San Quentin State Prisoner On His Road to Freedom

Arrested at 16 and tried as an adult for kidnapping and robbery, Eddy Zheng served over 20 years in California prisons and jails. Ben Wang's BREATHIN': THE EDDY ZHENG STORY paints an intimate portrait of Eddy -- the prisoner, the immigrant, the son, the activist -- on his journey to freedom, rehabilitation and redemption.

Winner of the Audience Award for Documentary Feature at CAAMFest, Jury Award for Best Documentary and Audience Award for Best Documentary at Austin Asian American Film Festival, and the Jason D. Mak Social Justice Award at the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival of Oregon.

Related videos

Does sentencing a teenager to life without parole serve society? Following a Florida man who received four life sentences at age 15, this eye-opening film reveals a justice system that routinely condemns young Americans to die in prison.

Learn from the lives and experiences of 13 African-American men incarcerated at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail in Charlottesville, Virginia. They all have aspirations, hopes and dreams. They love, laugh, learn, miss their families, are regretful for the things they've done, wish they had completed their education, and would much rather…

A gang member, a mother, and a small-time dealer. They served their sentences, they're on parole. Now they're about to discover that walking out the prison gates is just the beginning. A HARD STRAIGHT tells the story of what it is really like for a person to make the radical…

You're more likely to go to prison in the USA than any other country in the world. THE SURVIVORS GUIDE TO PRISON explores the current state of the US prison system, focusing on the experiences of two wrongly convicted men, Reggie Cole and Bruce Lisker.
Featuring gripping commentary from former…

With this intimate, graphic film, award-winning director Dan Edge follows four residents of a housing project in Louisville, Ky., as they cycle in and out of the state's jails and prisons. More than two years in the making, the program uses deep access to the Louisville jail to offer raw…

An Audience Award-winning film at the SXSW Film Festival, this is a stunning true-crime documentary with human core.
In 1986 Michael Morton's wife Christine is brutally murdered in front of their only child, and Michael is convicted of the crime. Locked away in Texas prisons for a quarter century, estranged…

Like many young Cambodian Americans who arrived in the U.S. as refugees in the '80s, Loeun Lun, Many Uch and Kim Ho Ma hoped for the best. Little did they know that their destinies, guided by youthful mistakes and the unforeseeable events of 9/11, would bring them full-circle decades later:…

An unprecedented and enlightening look inside a youth-prison boot camp, ROCK AND A HARD PLACE focuses on the lives of a diverse group of incarcerated young people in Florida, each of whom are granted a second chance: the opportunity to trade an extensive prison sentence for a fresh start by…

Researcher Barbara Zahm gives a brief history of the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion in which forty-three men died, and the college prison program which was initiated afterward. After interviews with prison inmates, "The Movement for College Programs of New York State Prisons After Attica" was formed. Zahm tells of her…

When men in a state prison join with victims of crime to create a mural about healing, their views on punishment, remorse, and forgiveness collide. Finding consensus is not easy - but as the participants move through the creative process, mistrust gives way to surprising moments of human contact and…

The United States has the most prisoners of any nation in the world both in raw numbers and by percentage of the population. These numbers are further compounded within Milwaukee's mostly African-American 53206 zip code, where 62% of adult men have spent time in prison, making this America's most incarcerated…